GIOVANNI CIMABUE.
This great painter is universally considered the restorer of modern painting. The Italians call him "the Father of modern Painting;" and other nations, "the Creator of the Italian or Epic style of Painting." He was born at Florence in 1240, of a noble family, and was skilled both in architecture and sculpture. The legends of his own land make him the pupil of Giunta; for the men of Florence are reluctant to believe that he was instructed in painting by those Greek artists who were called in to embellish their city with miracles and Madonnas. He soon conquered an education which consisted in reproducing, in exact shape and color, the works of other men: he desired to advance: he went to nature for his forms; he grouped them with a new skill; he bestowed ease on his draperies, and a higher expression on his heads. His talent did not reside in the neat, the graceful, and the lovely; his Madonnas have little beauty, and his angels are all of one make: he succeeded best in the heads of the old and the holy, and impressed on them, in spite of the barbarism of his times, a bold sublimity, which few have since surpassed. Critics object to the fierceness of his eyes, the want of delicacy in the noses of his figures, and the absence of perspective in his compositions; but they admit that his coloring is bright and vigorous, his conceptions grand and vast, and that he loved the daring and the splendid. Nevertheless, a touch of the mechanical Greek School, and a rudeness all his own, have been observed in the works of this great painter. His compositions were all of a scriptural or religious kind, such as the church required: kings were his visitors, and the people of Florence paid him honors almost divine.